The Sesquipedalist questions moves to protect the title "architect" by going straight to the core: what is the knowledge of architecture? What do architects actually do? Read it all, because this one's important! Is the free market the right place to prove the value of architecture?
4 Comments
"So architects need to get it straight between themselves what this knowledge is that they are claiming.
The big problem is that the great contribution architects can make to the design of the built environment is value based. The best ones fight for quality against the profit-mongers and for the more ethical aspects of building, such as sustainability and community. This affects both the bottom line and the quality of life and is a laudible ambition that I cannot praise the best architects highly enough for. If there were some way this could be bottled up, marketed and sold to society, then I would be the first to grant it a state-controlled monopoly. Until then, I say let the architectural profession compete and live or die on what it holds dear as its knowledge."
I'm mostly in agreement, with the caveat that our life or death is also a measure of how we explain (or fail to explain) our value to the laity.
The era of hyper rational diagrams ala OMA and its offspring was very powerful in convincing clients to sign off on projects, but it twisted the logic of architectural projects and their presentation towards immediate return on investment. If architecture hopes to retain any honorific position in society, and if it hopes to be valuable as anything other than high-end cake decoration, we're going to have to figure out new ways to convey our value, to help translate the value of architectural and urban planning into common language so that both clients and the big, foamy public may (literally) buy into our efforts.
In other words, we may already have a surplus of knowledge but it's locked away in formats that are nonsense to anyone but other architects.
The computer and science industries is very eager to take the word 'architect' for their own purposes. Look how Bill Gates was the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. Nobody cares, of course. And so is this issue.
"Architects" will always be those people on their drafting tables sitting around some skyscraper models, as demonstrated by kindergarten books and Banana Republic. No identity crisis here.
I was agreeing with the blog right up until he/she suggested the RIBA take over for the ARE.
there are some different things in play in this piece than what we deal with in the u.s. not that the overall themes aren't valid, but there isn't quite the distinction here between the architectural profession and the "architectural technician profession" cited. sounds like the u.k. may have a similar setup to the netherlands where there are designer-architects as a separate body from the facilitator/documenting consultants. the traditional architectural firm in the states wraps this into one, soup to nuts, though there are some variations - usually in the form of the design architect/architect-of-record model that is specific to SOME projects.
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